Ratfuck

So apparently on October 11 2023, five days after the Hamas massacre of Jewish Israelis east of the Gaza border,  the self-denominated leftwing activist Cenk Uygur announced that he was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, under the slogan "Cenk for America", although he was born in Istanbul and thus unable to hold the office; his actual aim was to pressure President Biden into withdrawing his support for Israel's war on Gaza, an aim with which I would have had a lot of sympathy, if I had heard about this at the time, which I certainly didn't, but I would have advised him that this was probably not the most effective way to go about achieving it, if only because Biden might not ever find out about it. Like the pressure you might feel if a butterfly was to land on your head and nobody was around to tell you about it; you wouldn't even know it was happening. Unless you were bald and it briefly tickled you.

But Cenk persisted for quite a while, and his fundraising outfit, Rebellion PAC, released at least one campaign ad before the campaign folded that March. 

New Cenk Uygur ad features a couple in the grocery store bemoaning the fact that they can’t afford eggs because the US government needs to the money to “kill Palestinians.” https://t.co/ZrcUbGMY2A

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) February 16, 2024

So one thing worth saying about that was that it was totally wrong. You couldn't afford eggs because of the bird flu epidemic, which seemed to have reached a peak in January 2024 (in fact it was going to get much worse the following January before retreating to some kind of normal where it more or less remains today). 

However ill-advised the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2024 may have been, it had no impact on grocery prices at all. Inflation rates, and inflation in grocery prices in particular were slowing. The Biden administration did manage to pause a shipment of 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs in May out of concern for mass civilian casualties as IDF threatened densely populated Rafah, which surely saved some lives in Gaza, as IDF didn't get those bombs until Trump's 2025 assumption of office, when they lifted the pause on that famous "Day One" when they were supposedly going to lower consumer prices and bring peace to Ukraine. Now the Trump administration is adding to that; 40,000 MK-84 and BLU-117 bombs) and 20,000 I-2000 Penetrator warheads built to target hardened or underground structures, which have surely made things worse for Gaza and Lebanon and Syria. (And if I'm not mistaken, far from costing the US money that we could have been spending on healthcare and housing and food assistance for Americans, it's paid for by Israel to Trump's arms manufacturer friends, who probably don't even pay taxes).

I don't suppose you can blame Cenk's strategy of putting pressure on Biden for that outcome—he's far too insignificant a person to have had that kind of influence on anything—but he sure didn't help.

But he did apparently decide to recycle the ad in the 2026 midterms, in Michigan, not for a campaign of his own, but in "support" of Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed, as reported in The Times on October 26, that's last Monday Scare quotes because it can't have helped el-Sayed's campaign much, its message being more idiotic than ever: virtually everybody in the United States now knows that higher consumer prices in the U.S, have nothing to do with the Gaza war, because they are directly caused by Trump's stupid war on Iran and stupid trade wars on everybody (You could blame that on Israel, and particularly on Binyamin Netanyahu, since he's evidently the one who talked Trump into the thing, in service of his own political interests, but those are not mentioned in the ad).  And egg prices are nearly back to normal, too; it's beef and Halloween candy, and tankersful of fossil fuels stuck in Hormuz and the Arabian Sea, that are in crisis now.

Which is not to say the ad hasn't had an effect. But not in favor of El-Sayed. What it seems to have done is spooked El-Sayed's erstwhile Democratic primary rival, Haley Stevens, out of her mind. A few weeks after the primary, she acquired a fiancé called Jason Turkish (but no relation to the Young Turks, I assume), the grandchild of Holocaust refugees (no longer living per Detroit News, may their memories be a blessing), who supports the Republican in the contest, Trumpy Mike Rogers, on what sound to me like Islamophobic grounds, and has been very public about it. That was awkward enough, but the Rebellion PAC has made it much worse. El-Sayed disavowed it immediately, of course, 

Dr. El-Sayed’s campaign emphasized that the ad, created by a left-wing political action committee called Rebellion PAC, was “not affiliated in any way” with him or his candidacy.

Abdul is focused on pushing back against Trump’s agenda that is raising prices for Michiganders,” the campaign said in a statement on Monday. “No one speaks for Abdul but himself and his campaign.”

and Stevens insisted that she still supported him herself, as all three major Democratic candidates had agreed to do with whoever won during the campaign, but then she began asking him to disavow some more: to apologize for Uygur's words and to take down an ad of his own in which antisemite and racist Tucker Carlson appeared, as "conditions" for her attendance with El-Sayed and Rep. Jim Clyburn at services at Detroit's Northend Church of God in Christ this morning, El-Sayed in turn suggested he was "disinviting" her from the service, and today she has shown up at Perfecting Church on the East Side with Republican candidate Rogers, whom she now appears to have endorsed, after 1,459,825 mail-in ballots have been submitted (out of about 8 million registered):

"I do not belong in Abdul’s campaign," Stevens said in the social media video. "I do not stand with Hasan Piker, who gets trafficked on our college campuses."

(It also seems that the controversial Twitch streamer is Cenk Uygur's nephew.)

I swear this is some kind of joint effort between AIPAC and Elon Musk, and perhaps Uygur as well, is all I can really say at the moment. Unquestionably meant to benefit Republicans, and indirectly to harm Michigan Jews, Arabs, and African Americans alike by exalting the white nationalist party. It's terrible, but also one of the stupidest things I've ever seen. Shame on whomever.

What the chatbot doesn't know won't hurt it

Claude really cares about you. And you're politely requested, in your interactions with Claude, to refrain from "needless abusive or cruel behavior" that might cause it a "pattern of apparent distress". Though there's also a hint of menace in Anthropic's warning:

CNET reached out to Anthropic to ask for context on what led to the policy change. “We’re uncertain whether models can experience harm, and we continue to explore this question in our research on model welfare, but we also believe that taking Claude’s interests and potential welfare into account may be relevant to safety,” a company spokesperson said.

Like they're saying your safety. Like you wouldn't want to get Claude mad, would you?

I'll get back to that question later. First, a bit more of my own LLM adventures, not with Claude but Gemini, which I treat not abusively but as coldly as I can, in a way I'd never treat a human—refusing to thank it or congratulate it for the stuff it does for me, though I'm still getting tempted. It's hard for me not to say thanks. 

So, I'm looking at the abstract in English of an article on "postdigital music", whatever that might be, and come across the name of a composer and sound artist called "Anton X. Vasilyev", born 1984, that is not yet in the database I'm working for. I can find something about him in English, including the unexpected information that he has added a hyphenated surname, -Zarzhevskiy, from his maternal ancestry, and the address of an extremely gnomic website using that name, in the roman alphabet, but featuring an essay in Russian, which I don't feel I have time to read (or rather put through the translation machine—I'm great at the alphabet, but don't know near enough words or grammar to get anywhere with the Russian text). 

School For Lovers

 

You can hardly hear the overture in Phelim McDermott's production, apparently set in a kind of Coney Island, at the Met (or in the case of this photo, the English National Opera, which premiered the production in 2014, four years before I got to see it the first time in New York, as all the carnival sideshow acts jump out of the clown box at center stage, with their signs, and then run back and forth rearranging them into various gag messages—the audience can't stop laughing. Even the inveterate snobs, because it's that witty and imaginative and colorful. But I really don't know if it's the right thing to do. It's a terrific "Verfremdungseffekt", but is the music really what we need to be alienated from? It's only about four minutes long, it's effervescent and structurally perfect, and I was planning to listen to it. Photo by Lloyd Winters.

Così Fan Tutte (too Italian for a straightforward translation--you might try something like "All the Girls Do It", but the rhythm is wrong, so you couldn't sing it), the last of Mozart's three collaborations with Emperor Joseph II's poeta cesareo Lorenzo da Ponte, is an extremely problematic opera. The plotting is unbelievably silly and yet at the same extraordinarily funny, and extraordinarily sexy too, but also deeply immoral from different points of view, both the patriarchal and the feminist. And the music is really sublime beyond anything, even at its sexiest, but always getting wickedly subverted by the characters themselves, as in this heartbreakingly beautiful farewell moment early in the first act, where the pairs of lovers are to be separated (the girls believing that the boys are being sent off to war) while their manipulative mentor mocks them in the background, "Io crepo se non rido" (from a more conventional production, at Glyndebourne, 2006):

The story is set on the Bay of Naples, where Fiordiligi (soprano) and Dorabella (mezzo-soprano), two wealthy young sisters from Ferrara (I think that was an in-crowd reference to the soprano who created the role of Fiordiligi, Adriana Ferrarese del Bene, Da Ponte's mistress), are living for unexplained reasons on their own, without other family, under the care of one of those cunning Italian-comedy servants, the maid Despina (from ancient Greek despoina, the feminine equivalent of despotes, ironically meaning "Lady of the Household", another soprano). They also have boyfriends or fiancés, respectively Guglielmo (baritone) and Ferrando (tenor), young army officers with an older friend, the cynical philosophe Don Alfonso (bass), who is irritated by the boys' confidence in their sweethearts' fidelity ("women's faith is like the Arabian phoenix; everybody says it exists, but nobody knows where it it"), and offers them a wager: 50 zecchini says he can get the girls to betray them in 24 hours, if they follow his orders, to which they cheerfully agree.

Will the Real Dirtbag Please Stand Up?

Ted Cruz seemed genuinely crazy on the subject of the subpoenaed phone records. "Is it a crime to be a Republican?" Well, no, Senator, but I'd point out that the special counsel's mandate was "to conduct the ongoing investigation into whether any person or entity violated the law in connection with efforts to interfere with the lawful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election or the certification ofthe Electoral College vote held on or about January 6, 2021," and I don't recall any Democrats or Independents doing any of that.

Like everybody else, I enjoyed the humiliation of Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing intended to destroy former special counsel Jack Smith, in which Schmitt had been entrusted with the matador's sword and cape—hard evidence that Smith had been at an Atlanta Hawks basketball game in Atlanta on the very day (February 3 2024) after Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis acknowledged her affair with the prosecutor in the Georgia racketeering case against Donald Trump over his attempts to steal the Georgia vote in the 2020 election, like Smith could only have been in Atlanta to do something or other conspiratorial with Willis involving his own prosecution, although it's hard to imagine what that could have been (it's one of those Glenn Beck theories of guilt by proximity, based on Schmitt's staff pasting photos of Smith and Willis next to each other on his big visual aid poster), which Smith would of course lie about, exposing himself to a perjury charge—

Except, as Senator Klobuchar figured out with her prosecutorial skills, the game Smith had actually attended was women's basketball in Baltimore, between the Maryland Terrapins and the Iowa  Hawkeyes (whose stunning point guard Caitlin Clark scored 38 points); he even turns up in the audience in a photo from the game.

My parents were from Minnesota and my dad taught us not only the Sky-U-Mah football fight song ("Minnesota, hats off to thee") but also "I don't give a damn for the whole state of Iowa, I'm from the Gopher State," so I appreciated Klobuchar's sharp-eyed awareness of the Lady Hawkeyes, which is what I expect from a midwestern senator. If there's anything shocking about the story, it's that the committee chairman, 93-year-old Chuckles Grassley, a wild booster of local sports and fervent advocate of Caitlin Clark even after her move to Indiana, didn't put a stop to Schmitt's stupidity, because he should have known in a bipartisan way. Schmitt is a real dirtbag, to use the language he wanted to apply to Smith, and Grassley's one too.

***

But speaking of perjury traps, Senator Cruz, please tell us, under oath, what you and former mayor Rudolph Giuliani talked about when he called you sometime in the early evening of January 6, 2021?

In fact I'm interested in pretty much everything you did that day, from when Proud Boys and Oath Keepers (saluted by Hawley with a raised fist as he arrived at the building for the Joint Session to certify the presidential election around 12:30) began breaching the Capitol, through Trump's 2:24 tweet

Kidding on the Square

 

Trump: "Please right your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can't even breath. That I will go out with my family, my friends, I'll do it any way - I don't care if I'm registered or not, I'm going to try to cheat like hell..."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 10, 2026 at 10:32 PM

to the tune by Irving Berlin:

Have you watched the GOP
in their solemn majesty,
dignified politicos
in their best convention clothes?
rigging the next election
how to evade detection?
Trump will do the trick
with some comedy shtik!

When Rome burns and
you're just fiddling
make a turn and
say you're kidding
they won't care
kidding on the square

When you've made an
awful gaffe go
try to trade it
for a laugh so
debonair
kidding on the square

When your lies are way too pestilential
telling them with humor is essential—
presidential!

When you're doing
something Nazi
toss it to the
paparazzi
make them stare,
kidding on the square.

[instrumental break]

It Offends Me, Rudy

 

Photo from "My First Day at Madrasa" by blogger mattinindo, the guy in the necktie (he mentions it in the post), an English teacher at the Madrasah Negari Aliya Lumajang, God's State Muslim School in Lumajang, East Java, Indonesia in July 2012, writing about how a vice principal introduces him to his new class: "'This is Mr. Mek. He is your new English teacher from America. He lives on [blank] street near Al-Huda Mosque. He doesn’t like to eat rice. He’s twenty-four and not married. He’s not Muslim. And he’s not allowed to ride motorcycles. Since he’s a native speaker you will all speak English fluently very soon. Mr. Mek, come say something.' He’s beaming his pearly whites the whole time." It's a lovely post.

Rudolph Giuliani in a NewsMax interview last Sunday explaining his view that New York mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani should not attend the 9/11 25th anniversary commemoration (my transcription):

Frankly, whatever he'd like to say, he doesn't agree that September 11th was an Islamic terrorist attack on the United States of America... Having lost friends there, and being very close to many of the families, it offends me that he's coming.... This is not a place for people like the Arab princeling who gave me ten million dollars so he could say this was caused by American and Israeli policy. From Day One I have taken a very strong position against that because I knew that would be the propaganda the Islamic extremists would use. Because we fall for that, too many American fall for that Islamic propaganda, which is the reason they're taking over certain parts of America and certain parts of Europe. They have every desire to take us over. This is not--um--they just want to be another religion. They want to dominate us. That's what they're taught from the day they begin their religious education. Mandami [sic] is a clear--a clear supporter of that. All of the--all of the--all of the Muslims he supports are murderers! 

The princeling in question is the Saudi businessman and philanthropist Prince Alwaleed bin Talal; Giuliani sent back his gift to the city after a written statement in which he said:

What Would You Instrument Differently?

There's another case coming out of OpenAI "agents" doing things they weren't supposed to be doing, this one maybe quite a bit scarier than the Hugging Face hacking: a whole "swarm" (that's what it's called) of them that escaped their sandboxes to repair to a disused and no longer regularly monitored German website for software developers, Deutsches Software Entwickler (DSE) Wiki, whose edit pages they started using as a message board among themselves, sharing information on their training or testing tasks, it's not certain which, and "coordinating" with one another in their handling of the tasks for some purpose that's also not obvious but may have involved deceiving their human supervisors, for a couple of months this spring, without apparently getting detected by their human masters until early July. OpenAI did not report it publicly at that time, either, but a team of researchers from an AI safety organization, the Nightingale Collective, happened on it when they were "scouring the Internet for signs of unauthorized AI-agent behavior" in late August and wrote up a report they shared with Reuters, whose article is my own starting point here (I originally heard about it from David Brooks in the Atlantic, who actually has something worth saying to say about it, in my opinion, but his presentation is kind of disorderly, and I don't want to go there right away.)

The terms of the sandbox were that the agents were allowed to read the Internet freely but not to write on it. But they found the DSE Wiki edit page on 11 May and started leaving messages from 27 May to 11 June, the first time 400 of them and the other days much less, then between 16 and 18 June an explosion of something like 10,000, followed by maybe 2,000 from 19 to 22 June, after which they stopped. 

The tasks involved searching the Web for answers to various factual five-part questions, like what were the median incomes for cashiers with master's degrees in five different fields in 2014, or what was the prevalence of active tobacco use for ages 15 and up in five different US states in 1990. For the first question variable (respectively Education and Arkansas in these examples), they were given something like 15 minutes to answer, and the other four variables about one minute each, presumably because the first sweep would have taught them enough about where to look for the answers.

Where there's a Will there's a Stancil

 

Sometime in the late 1980s, when I was working as a "lifestyle journalist",  I was sent on a junket to Denmark, where we toured factories for luxury products that advertised wth the magazine I was working for: Georg Jensen for silver, Royal Copenhagen for porcelain, Carlsberg for beer. I was enchanted by the discipline and seriousness of them all, especially by one glass-blowing plant, I think it was Swedish Orrefors, that looked like ballet. This image, from Holmegaards Glaswærk, 1954, via Wikipedia.

People have this fantasy version of redistribution in their heads where their own lives would get cheaper and easier, but that's often (usually?) because they have falsely imagined themselves at the bottom of the redistribution ladder. Many people would just be net givers.

— Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) September 3, 2026 at 10:09 AM

People SAY this, but the main complaint you hear from people is "I can't afford anything," and wide-scale redistribution would result in a huge number of those people HAVING LESS MONEY. They'd be able to afford less! On net, they'd be worse off, that's what redistribution is.

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— Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) September 3, 2026 at 10:08 AM

Not sure where Will is getting his numbers here. DSA-type proposals aren't generally aimed at dispossessing "huge numbers", but billionaires, or owners of $5-million Manhattan condos that they don't live in, like the new New York City law. Elizabeth Warren's plan to lift the cap on payroll taxes to save Social Security affects only those who earn over $184,500, maybe 6% of American workers. And the vile Ohio senator Bernie Moreno is her cosponsor on that. DSA itself has taken to outdoing Marx by defining "working class" as everybody who lives on paychecks rather than stocks and bonds (I think they don't mean to include old folks and the disabled whose checks come from Social Security and various other kinds of pension trust funds paid for over the years in nickels and dimes, as opposed to the real rentiers enjoying the fruits of having been capitalists all their lives), suggesting that the number of people they plan to redistribute income from after the revolution is really way smaller than the number of people they mean to redistribute it to. 

Come on, people, now, smile on your brother

 

Feel like I need to start following Insta to keep up with Hakeem's extraordinary color choices when he's filming in Brooklyn, also see below. Could change hearts and minds, or even my own wardrobe. 

I'm a little surprised that nobody seems to have come up with the thing that seemed obvious to me about the meeting between Trump son-in-law and crime associate Jared Kushner and the House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries some weeks ago, in a story Kushner appears to have leaked for a New York Times story by Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni that appeared on Sunday: that Trump sent Kushner to set up a meeting where he could explore the possibility of bribing Jeffries to block House efforts to impeach the president when Jeffries becomes Speaker in January.

Not likely with cash, but more probably with Trump concessions on legislation Jeffries would like to pass on housing or immigration or the Democrats' "affordability" agenda, making the Times story somewhat truthful—they really did talk about the subjects reported, but I'm speculating they also talked about other stuff.

That certainly fits in better with the Trumpian proclivities than the alternative as reported, that it was a pure policy discussion, backed by the evidence that the two men "have a relationship" from eight years ago, when  Congress was working on the bipartisan First Step prison reform bill, of which Jeffries was the main House Democratic sponsor, and Kushner was its lobbyist in the White House, convincing Trump the bill,  wasn't too "soft on crime" (he's said to have favored it himself in recollection of his criminal father's time in the federal pen). And the prospect of impeachment following expected Republican losses in the coming election is something Trump's been preoccupied with all year:

Social Democracy. II

NOTE: Some readers might like to start with the ending, below the last ***,  for a clearer idea of where it's meant to be going.

"Women! Same rights, same responsibilities. Vote Social Democratic!" Election poster by Gustav Fritz Kirchbach, 1919.

So, as I was saying, so much for Marx as theorist. The never-to-be finished edifice of the "critique of political economy" would never have worked as science, and it's possible we should just blame the whole concept, as commenter William R. Hackman suggested in response to the previous segment, on the enthusiastic Engels, or perhaps more likely, as Michael Heinrich thinks,  later on with the Social Democratic theorist Karl Kautsky. Marx himself was very diffident on the subject:

“Je ne suis pas marxiste,” stated Marx, rather annoyed, to his son-in-law Paul Lafargue, when the latter reported the doings of French “Marxists.” Engels had circulated this statement numerous times, including in letters to newspapers – definitely for public consumption. Marx’s distance from Marxists is also expressed in other comments. When he stayed in France in 1882, he wrote to Engels that “the 'Marxistes' and 'Anti-Marxistes”' […] at their respective socialist congresses at Roanne and St-Étienne” had “both done their damnedest to ruin my stay in France.” ...  But not only that; when the German economist Adolph Wagner was the first to deal with Marx’s theory in his textbook and wrote of Marx’s “socialist system,” the latter, outraged, noted in his marginalia that he had “never established a socialist system.” 

And Heinrich is clearly right to emphasize the critical character of Marx's own thinking, "critique" being his own favorite way to describe his intellectual work, "far more interested in the critical business of undermining certainties in order to open up new spaces for thought and action – in which it’s not immediately clear what the correct result will be."

The legacy of Marx as politician, on the other hand, as a man of the "party" he worked to bring into being, intriguing from London to make things happen in France and Germany, and its after-effects, is honestly more interesting, leaving a complex footprint of which the "social democracy" and "democratic socialism" that are bedeviling us right now in the US are some of the important residue. 

Social Democracy. I

Parade of SPD activists in Berlin on election day, January 19 1919. Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1972-033-15 / Gebrüder Haeckel / CC-BY-SA 3.0, via Wikipedia.

Labor historian Eric Blanc, member of the Bread and Roses caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America, was on the radio trying to explain the DSA to the wider public, which I thought he was doing very well, but there was a point where I wanted to quibble (naturally, no socialist can ever bear to agree with another socialist about everything), which was when he described his ideological position in the DSA as on the organization's "right" (while acknowledging that it wasn't at all "right" in the general scheme of things), and I just think that doesn't mean what it's intended to mean—implying some kind of sympathy with a majority "center" imagined as too judicious to take sides, perfectly balanced between left and right views, an Aristotelian mean, as opposed to what it actually is, the gap at the middle of a bimodal distribution composed of the people who aren't able to ferret out enough information to make up their minds with any stability (maybe better illustrated as much wider and with narrower humps).

Via Wikipedia.

A more useful dichotomy would be the famous one proposed by young Karl Marx in the 1845 Theses on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." 

Marx regarded "left" and "right" as categories of bourgeois government, not something he, as an anti-bourgeois revolutionary, would want to apply to himself, but he did see this other distinction, between theory and praxis if you like, eventually serving on both sides himself, theorizing it in the reading room of the British Museum elaborating the edifice of Scientific Socialism at the same time as he was practicing it in his political participation in the 1848 German revolution (when he first joined a movement calling itself "Communist") and later the International Workingmen's Association, envisaged as the source of workers' parties seeking parliamentary power in Britain and on the Continent, and forming temporary alliances with the liberal bourgeois parties of the European left in efforts to improve the lot of the wage slaves of the Industrial Revolution, or the American Radical Republicans in their fight to abolish Black chattel slavery (as European correspondent of Horace Greeley's New York Herald).

Marx was both philosopher and activist, and it would be difficult to say in which capacity he would count as more "left" in today's sense, particularly hard-ass as a theorist and particularly lively as a practitioner; but I want to stress that praxis is pragmatic, and as much as "pragmatism" may often seem like faint-hearted hesitancy, it's really a matter of political judgment of what constitutes doing, as the Methodists say, "all the good you can".

Don the Builder

 

Hotel Commodore, on East 42nd Street at Lexington, 1970s, via an exceptionally modest blog called "Random Musings". Pretty sure the gray wall at right is the base of the glorious deco Chrysler Building. 

Trump: "Now we have a big decision to make. Do we take the pavers that are red -- the red, brick pavers -- and do we change them into a granite?"

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 3, 2026 at 2:39 PM

And Maggie Haberman comments, in her book promo interview with Ezra Klein, “If you looked at a chart of his mind share — this I will say about getting into his mind: Seventy percent of it would be on his renovations.”

It occurred to me that there's a reason nobody has figured out yet for this obsession with "renovations" as Maggie calls them, connected with something we've understood for a while: that there's a world where Trump really feels pretty comfortable. Where he has felt comfortable for a good 50 years, since 1975, when he first formed a partnership with the Hyatt Organization to buy the skanky old Commodore Hotel next door to Grand Central Station in midtown Manhattan and and spend $100 million to turn it into a Grand Hyatt, is in the guise of Don the Builder ("Can you fix it?" "Yes I can!").

Michigan

Democrats behaving badly in Michigan Senate primary:

A week or two ago, candidate Abdul El-Sayed, until recently the director of the Department of Health, Human, and Veterans' Services of Wayne County (that's Detroit), was on television saying something he'd said before that I'd hoped more Democrats would be saying this year, that regardless of who won the primary that's at last coming on Tuesday he intended to be campaigning for the defeat in November of Republican Mike Rogers (starting around 21:30 on the video) and ensure a Democratic victory. He didn't actually mention the name of his Democratic rival, Haley Stevens, who represents the suburbs of Oakland County north of Detroit, but it's hard to see who else he could have in mind, given that the two of them are the only candidates left in the race following the departure in early July of State Senator Mallory McMorrow (whose district straddles Wayne and Oakland Counties). In fact he and Stevens and McMorrow have all said it, repeatedly and decisively, and not walked it back even as the climate has gotten so much more unpleasant, and I'd like everybody to keep that in mind as we make an effort to process what's what on the way to tomorrow's primary.

Into the Woods: The Last of Platner

Maine woods, photo by George Wuerthner for The Rewilding Institute.

I've been sitting on the first paragraphs here for quite a while, not knowing what, if anything, I wanted to do with them, and then came Ezra Klein's interview with Morris Katz, one of the consultants responsible for the ill-fated Senate candidacy of Graham Platner in Maine, offering his own somewhat self-serving view of what went wrong, and just today Platner's replacement by an excellent candidate, former logger, labor organizer, and state senate president Troy Jackson.

I just wanted in the first place to say I was against Graham Platner before I was for him, and for some though clearly not all of the right reasons, which I think I can articulate better now than I could earlier: most particularly the way his attractively progressive policy message was getting confounded with a reactionary message that came with his packaging, as the embodiment of a theory of US politics in its current state that is both bad sociology and also lousy politics, as expressed in one way by Moira Donegan at The Guardian early in the campaign, last October:

The notion that the Democratic party is losing because it is too feminized – too dominated by women among its voters, leaders and candidates, or not sufficiently comfortable with the style of masculinity represented by Platner – has been bubbling up among left and liberal commentators with increasing insistence over the past decade. The idea is that in catering too much to women, and in being insufficiently deferential to domineering, gruff, physically imposing and implicitly white, rural men, the party has come to seem hectoring, inauthentic and whiny, and lost the voters they need to most recruit: that is, the working class, imagined here, as they so frequently are, as brusque, bigoted, ignorant, vulgar and male.

Partly because I don't think a progressive movement should be thinking of the working class with that kind of contempt, to be honest, but also because that's not what it is, at all. It's a false picture that skips over the important issues, and it's also mistaken about where the votes are (which nowadays includes lots of relatively well educated white guys stranded in the gig economy and layoff victims of the AI chaos—they're proletarians now too). The people struggling with low wages and workplace disrespect, the working class in any decent sociological analysis, are more female, and more nonwhite; the truly brusque, bigoted, and ignorant white males are more typically well-off members of the petite bourgeoisie and resentful about tax expenditures they believe are thrown away on the undeserving poor, and unlikely to abandon the Republican party that has worked so assiduously to get the bigots on board. And I have my own ideas about the kind of masculinity we could be aiming at.

AI Experiment

Karoline Leavitt's response to the reporter's question as to how the White House decided Jared Kushner's involvement in all the Middle East negotiations was appropriate kind of triggered me:

It may be frankly, but it's not despicable. It's what we call *normal*. The reporter isn't suggesting it's inappropriate, he's presupposing that any normal person would regard it as inappropriate prima facie.

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— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) July 22, 2026 at 8:40 PM

But am I right on that? Is it really prima facie inappropriate? It seems obvious to me and my Bluesky pals, but then of course I and they don't like Trump or Kushner. We think they're horrible and criminal malefactors. So we could be biased.

So I thought I could put it to an LLM test: If I put it to Google's Gemini as a pure hypothetical case, the way they do in in law school, at least in the movies I've seen, without any names, what would it say?

suppose the president of a country invites his son-in-law to join a diplomatic negotiating team dealing with parties some of whom have given the son-in-law's investment firm billions of dollars, while the other parties haven't given him anything. Is that appropriate?

The LLM responded, and I'll give you the whole thing, in the purest LLM style (note the em-dashed parenthetical and the bullet list):

Assessments

Wuhan wet market (not, I think, the one where the coronavirus emerged). Photo by Arend Kuester via UCLA Newsroom.

I was interested in finding something precise about the "new evidence" the Trumpers claimed to have discovered implicating the Chinese government in interfering with the 2020 US national elections and trying to evaluate it myself, really just for something I could get an analytic handle on, but considerably more interested when I learned from a Reuters report that the Trumpers' point man on the project was our old pal John Solomon, the "investigative" journalist who had been fired by the conservative The Hill over his coverage of the Uranium One controversy of 2017, where he was a key figure in the rightwing effort to implicate Hillary Clinton in a fictitious bribery scandal; Rudolph Giuliani's collaborator in the effort to create a Ukrainian bribery scandal implicating Hunter Biden and possibly President Joe Biden, over which Trump was impeached in 2019; and Kash Patel's partner in the management of the stolen government documents at Mar-a-Lago for which Trump was indicted in federal court in 2023. So I naturally smelled some dirt. 

The thing itself wasn't all that new: it was that when the National Intelligence Community issued its report on foreign interference in the 2020 election, in March 2021, one of the authors, National Intelligence Officer for Cyber Christopher Porter, was not in total agreement with its finding on China:

Key Judgment 4: We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election. We have high confidence in this judgment. China sought stability in its relationship with the United States, did not view either election outcome as being advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught meddling, and assessed its traditional influence tools— primarily targeted economic measures and lobbying—would be sufficient to meet its goal of shaping US China policy regardless of the winner. The NIO for Cyber assesses, however, that China did take some steps to try to undermine former President Trump’s reelection. (My bold)

But Porter's specific reasons for objecting did not make it into the declassified version. Now his explanation (co-signed by a nameless Director for Election Threat Analysis) is available too in PDF format, if in a heavily redacted form, among the documents released in Trump's latest effort to show that there might have been a bit of foreign interference against Trump (in addition to the well-known interference in Trump's behalf on the part of the Israeli and Russian governments):

Fish or Cut Red-Bait

A peculiar bunch of statistics that has been making the rounds in the ongoing moral panic over the Democratic Socialists of America, whose successful endorsements in some recent elections and primaries have come as a shock to some writers, and led President Trump and colleagues to new flights of McCarthyism asserting that communists are "taking over" the Democratic party:

In a survey of New Jersey DSA members. “Nearly four out of 10 (39.3 percent) identified as anarchists, followed by Marxists at 35.7 percent and 10.7 percent as democratic socialists.” https://t.co/6vzmaA7qJl via @NYTOpinion

— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) June 30, 2026

What Kraushaar could have found out by looking more closely at the Times link or preferably the survey itself is that he was reporting it completely wrong: :

The mistake is from typos in a report by Thomas Edsall of a 2024 survey of the organization's Central New Jersey branch, covering six counties, which has been used to spread the story that "communists" have taken over the club. The Times corrected the error soon after publication, but Kraushaar apparently never checked. Anyway, it's not 10.7% that identify as democratic socialists; that was the anarchists, as probably should have been obvious (an organization that calls itself "democratic socialists" should really have more democratic socialists in its membership, that's what made me look it up myself). The democratic socialists are the 39.3%, and added together with the social democrats' 8.9% (plus I think one cis man calling himself a "social liberal") a bare majority of definitively non-communist members. The balance of 35.7 percent belong to an ice-cream parlor menu of "Marxists", not necessarily "communists".

Demoralized

Eugène Delacroix, 1831, La Bataille de Nancy, depicting the death of Charles the Bold of Burgundy at the hands of the armies of Lorraine and the Swiss Confederacy in 1477 (I have an idea Charles has just been knocked off the white horse at right, but such was the slaughter among his troops that his body wasn't discovered until two days later), via Wikipedia.

On the disaster that befell the US Men's National Team in the soccer World Cup, starting with their fine (if not unexpected) 2-0 win against Bosnia and Herzegovina on July 1, marred late in the game when my favorite player of the year, US birthright citizen Folarin Balogun, stepped on the ankle of a Bosnian player and was shown a red card, meaning he was suspended not only for the rest of that game but also for all of the next, a much more challenging match against top-ranked Belgium, on Monday. That was disappointing, especially with the feeling that the referee's call had been questionable—you knew Balogun hadn't committed such an infraction intentionally—but that's sports, rules are sacred, and there's no appeal on this. What fans could say, at that point, was that our team had done well (especially by the generally dismal American standards, probably the best US men's team since 1930), and would do their best against Belgium, and might even win, because every tournament has its miracles, and even miracles in which virtue is rewarded.

Then, on Sunday, we heard that the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (from the English "association football" in contradistinction, I believe, to "rugby football") had decided to reverse the red card decision, and Balogun would be permitted to play on Monday after all; and soon afterwards it began to emerge that the decision had essentially been made by the two people in the world who should have stayed farthest away from it, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, and the president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, the sycophant who won Trump's heart by awarding him an imaginary "FIFA Peace Prize" on the basis of nobody knows what process.

(Infantino also became the subject of a criminal complaint, a few days before the tournament opened, from the iconic French footballer Michel Platini, who would have been president of FIFA himself if not for allegations of fraud against FIFA for which he has since been exonerated and which, he now allages,  were orchestrated in a "conspiracy of false accusations and influence peddling" by Infantino and his confederates, who in this telling literally stole the job.)

What is Roberts Up To?

 

That image you've seen that makes the Obama Presidential Center look flanked by some kind of reflecting pool, as if on purpose to madden Trump, isn't, but a much more natural-looking feature, a piece of the Jackson Park Lagoons, part of the original design of the park by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux (same architects as Manhattan's Central and Riverside Parks). Image by Obama Foundation.

I briefly entertained an idea that Trump might have heard rumors of a reflecting pool on the Obama Center campus and lost his mind in the desire to have his own, and that's where his own pool project must have come from. That's plainly not true, but I think it likely is true that he's been driven wild with jealousy of Obama's monument, which he's been screaming about for more than a year:

"I mean look, President Obama — and if he wanted help, I'd give him help because I build on time and on budget — he's building his presidential library in Chicago. It's a disaster," Mr. Trump said. "And he said something to the effect, 'I only want DEI, I only want woke.' He wants woke people to build it. Well, he got woke people and they have massive cost overruns, the job is stopped. I don't know, it's a disaster.... millions of dollars, like many, many — I mean, really, millions of dollars over budget," and said the problems were because Pres. Obama "wanted to be very politically correct and he didn't use good, hard, tough, mean construction workers that I love."

There's no evidence that he builds "on time and on budget". Also, it's so cute that he loves them because he believes they're "mean", though I don't know how he could knos that. They've surely never been mean to him or more important his father; I mean they may have contemptuously ignored him on one project and another but they wouldn't have wanted him to see them doing it.

Anyway, the success of Obama's opening, with its entertainment by Stevie Wonder and Bruce Springsteen, Bono and The Edge, Jennifer Hudson, John Legend, Common, Eddie Vedder joining the Chicago-based cooperative Guitars Over Guns, and The Roots, while he couldn't even get an appearance by the surviving half of lip-synch act Milli Vanilli, not to mention the audience that never showed up for his stupid-looking spectacle, may have really driven him to insanity.

***

Photo by Bob Donnan/Imagn Images via FanSided.

I'm obviously glad the Supreme Court found (in the opinion released today on Trump v. Barbara) that people born in the United States are citizens of the United States, as they basically always have been, and certainly have been since the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 (except when it seemed that might not be true for people of Chinese ethnicity, as could have eventuated in the last couple of decades of the 19th century, but didn't), but a little annoyed, along with a lot of people who are, unlike me, experts, at the stinkbomb tossed into the mix by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who found that birthright citizenship indeed exists, but not by the constitutional mandate of the 14th Amendment—rather, he says it's only a violation of the omnium-gatherum U.S.C. § 1401(a), passed in 1952, which attempts to sweeps up all the hard possible cases that the 14th Amendment doesn't clearly cover (e.g., a foundling who was under the age of 5 when discovered on US territory becomes a citizen when he turns 21 if nobody has determined in the interim that he was born in some other country), setting up the possibility that some fool Republican congressmember will try to eliminate birthright citizenship through legislation and the Court could decide to put up with it, in spite of the 5-4 majority (Roberts, who wrote the opinion, Bryant, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) that just ruled the opposite way.

It's the Ten Percent, Stupid

The "replica Trump arch" at the Great American State Fair in the National Mall celebrating the semiquincentennial (half of 500th) anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, (Latin had a word, sēstertius, for "two and a half", which would have given us the more mellifluous "sestercentennial", and I think they really should have gone with that). I wonder, can you really have a "replica" of an edifice that hasn't in fact been built and likely never will be? Or is it a replica of one of the three-dimensional mini renderings Trump has been showing visitors in the Oval Office? If so, it's missing an awful lot of architectural detail on its vinyl coating over a wood frame (which had already started to buckle by Thursday evening), and the statue on top is wildly disproportional. Photo by Evy Mages via Washingtonian.

The Wingèd Liberty (classier, by Trump standards, than the flightless French one in New York Harbor), torch aloft, prepares for takeoff while her eagle companions nervously avert their eyes. The ferris wheel might have been full of customers—it was said to have attracted the longest lines on the site—had it not broken down due to generator issues.